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Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Author: Mandy Walker
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© 2026 Growth Activated | The B2B Marketing Leadership Podcast
Description
Growth Activated is a podcast for B2B marketing leaders who want to elevate their marketing strategies, lead confidently, and drive real business results. Each episode offers actionable insights and proven frameworks to help you activate growth for your team, your company, and your career.
45 Episodes
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LinkedIn would have you believe your competitors are running fully autonomous AI teams. They're not. The real picture of AI adoption in B2B marketing is far more varied — and far more instructive. Most marketing organizations are somewhere in the middle: using AI through a chat interface daily, but nowhere near the agentic workflows the feed suggests are already table stakes. Understanding where you actually stand, and where you intentionally want to go, turns out to be the strategic question...
You're feeling the pressure. Every board meeting, every LinkedIn scroll, every all-hands - AI is the expectation. But here's what the data actually shows: as of mid-2025, only 7% of companies had truly operationalized AI. Not just handed out a ChatGPT license. Actually embedded it into how their teams work. So if you've been wondering whether everyone else is further ahead than you - they're not. And what you do in 2026 to close that gap will determine how far ahead you get to be. In this epi...
What if one person could run your entire go-to-market motion — marketing, sales, and customer success — backed by a system of AI agents? That's exactly what Amos Bar-Joseph is building at Swan AI — and in this episode, he pulls back the curtain on the AI-powered GTM model that generated over $1.5 million in pipeline in a single month. As CEO and sole go-to-market operator, Amos runs every stage of the funnel with a lean agentic system designed from the ground up for human-AI collaboration, no...
# 42 - Most B2B podcasts plateau or quietly fade out. The difference between shows that stall and shows that build pipeline often comes down to three strategic decisions made before you ever hit record. Tom Hunt, CEO of Fame and one of the most experienced B2B podcast strategists in the space, joins the show to break down what actually separates the top-performing B2B podcasts from everyone else. After six years of building and running shows for B2B companies, Tom has seen the patterns — and ...
#41 - Your team is producing more content than ever, but pipeline isn’t reflecting it. That gap between output and impact usually isn’t a volume problem — it’s a strategy problem. And it’s exactly what this conversation is built to solve. Brendan Hufford, founder of Growth Sprints, helps B2B SaaS companies scale from $10 million to $100 million — largely through content. He’s a former high school teacher turned SEO director turned founder, and he brings a refreshingly direct take on what it a...
#40 - The landscape isn't just shifting — it's splitting. Buyers are choosing vendors before they ever talk to sales. AI is rewriting the rules faster than most of us can keep up. And budgets? Still flat. So instead of adding more to the list, I asked myself: if I could only make four strategic bets this year — four investments of my time, energy, and resources — what would they be? In this solo episode, I'm walking you through the 4 bets I'm making in 2026 as both a fractional CMO and the fo...
#39 - You've been using AI every day. You know there's a whole other level you haven't tapped into. And that gap between where you are and where the industry is headed? It's widening faster than most marketing leaders want to admit. This solo episode is the honest version of my AI journey — where I was, what I was getting right, what I was missing, and the moment a single conversation with a marketing leader building full AI agent teams made me realize I needed to stop waiting and start build...
#38 - Community-led growth keeps showing up on every B2B growth roadmap — but most teams either confuse it with audience building or give up before it has a chance to work. If you've wondered whether community is actually a GTM strategy or just a feel-good initiative, this episode answers that. Ridhi Singh, founder of 91 Ninjas and a GTM strategist who has worked with 94 B2B SaaS and AI companies globally, joins Mandy Hornaday for a clear-eyed conversation on what community-led growth actuall...
#37 - What if 45% of your new revenue came from LinkedIn content — and your team of 200 generated 1.2 million followers without a single automation tool or paid promotion? That's not a hypothetical. That's exactly what Gabe Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop, built. Gabe joins Mandy Hornaday to pull back the curtain on Alleyoop's employee advocacy program — how they went from 20,000 collective employee followers to 1.2 million, why they stopped spending $8,000 a month on job ads (and haven't looked back)...
#36 - Most CMOs are asking how AI can make their teams more efficient. The CMOs who are thriving — and in some cases getting elevated to Chief Business Officer or CRO — are asking a much bigger question: how is AI changing our customers, our markets, and our competitive landscape? Carol Meyers joins Mandy Hornaday for a conversation that reframes how marketing leaders should be thinking about AI. Carol is a former CMO and VP of Sales who has taken four companies public, and she now serves as ...
#35 - Agency, in-house, fractional — or some combination of all three? If you've been trying to figure out the right mix for your marketing team, this episode gives you a grounded, real-world framework from someone who has worked in all three models. In this special rerun episode, Mandy Hornaday switches seats — joining Kayla Bryant, General Manager at Two Trees PPC and host of The Marketing Chatroom, as the guest. What follows is a candid conversation about how marketing leaders and business...
#34 - Your team is running tests. But are they running the right ones — and do they actually know what they're trying to learn? Most B2B marketing teams test without a clear hypothesis, report on campaigns without asking why results were what they were, and scale pilots that were never designed to produce conclusive reads. Sarah Renner, VP of Marketing Strategy and Analytics at MarketBridge, has spent 20+ years at the intersection of data strategy and go-to-market experimentation — helping B2...
#33 - A full brand relaunch and website rebuild in six weeks — with a small team, no agency, and AI doing roughly 60% of the heavy lifting. Dana Gagnon didn't just pull it off. She built a repeatable workflow that other marketing leaders can actually use. Dana Gagnon is CMO at Every, a fintech payroll platform, and a former Pluralsight marketing leader who helped scale the company from 50 employees all the way through IPO. In this episode, she walks through the entire AI-powered rebrand proce...
#32 - It’s been a full season - from wedding planning and family celebrations to prepping new episodes for the podcast. In this short update, Mandy shares what’s been happening behind the scenes, why the feed’s been quieter, and what listeners can look forward to when Growth Activated returns in mid-November. Lead Like a CMO - Group Coaching Lab: Join the Waitlist Let’s Keep the Conversation Going! Loved this episode? Connect with me for more insights on B2B marketing leadership and strategie...
#31 – Your pipeline is down. Your team is hitting MQL targets. Your attribution tool isn't giving you answers. And marketing and sales are pointing fingers at each other. The problem isn't your team — it's that you're measuring the wrong thing. Carolyn Dilks is a 4x marketing leader turned Co-Founder and CEO of Passetto, a company built to expose what she calls the pipeline black box — the poorly tracked period before an opportunity is ever created. It's where the most critical, most ignored ...
#30 - In this episode of Growth Activated, Mandy Walker sits down with Bryna Dilman—a seasoned Growth & Demand Gen leader—for our very first live coaching session on the show. We tackle four questions many B2B marketing leader are wrestling with right now - and break down practical, real-world strategies you can take straight back to your team. Inside, we cover: Evolving roles in the AI era - are generalists making a comeback, or do specialists still win?Digital marketing in a noisy world...
#29 - AI is reshaping B2B marketing - but what does that actually look like inside a CMO’s org, plan, and P&L? Four-time CMO Ruth Zive (Voices; ex-Ada, LivePerson) joins host Mandy Walker to share practical plays marketing leaders can use right now across customer experience, brand, content, and go-to-market - without losing the human edge. You’ll learn: AI in CX & Brand: Why voice is the next brand asset (like your logo) and how leading brands license voices ethically and at scale.Ma...
#28 - Few conversations are more high-stakes for a B2B marketing leader than proving ROI to the C-Suite. Nail it, and you win trust, credibility, and budget. Miss the mark, and you risk being seen as a cost center instead of a growth driver. In this episode of Growth Activated, host Mandy Walker shares seven mistakes marketing leaders make when proving marketing ROI to executives — and exactly how to avoid them. Drawing on her experience leading teams from $1M to $750M in revenue, Mandy revea...
#27 – The first 90 days in a new marketing leadership role can make or break your long-term success. You’re learning a new company, navigating personalities and politics, absorbing new systems—and all eyes are on you to make an impact fast. In this solo episode of Growth Activated, Mandy Walker is sharing the 3 priorities she focuses on in every new CMO role—priorities that help her align with the business, unite her team, and deliver quick wins without burning out. Inside, we cover: How to p...
#26 - In this episode of Growth Activated, Mandy Walker sits down with Morgan J. Ingram — LinkedIn strategist, content creator, and founder of AMP Creative — to talk all things LinkedIn marketing, social selling, and building a personal and brand presence that actually drives results. Morgan breaks down the five key components of a high-impact social selling strategy, the role of marketing leadership in enabling sales teams on LinkedIn, and how modern B2B marketing leaders can create al...



